Can We Have Rockets?
by asad.jaleel
Summary: Superman has to decide whether or not the inhabitants of a planet should be allowed to explore outer space.


Despite all evidence to the contrary, Superman was not a god. So he did not relish the taste of playing God, no matter how often he had the occasion to encounter it. The Justice League appointed him to make a crucial decision about Mira, a planet 12 light-years away from Earth. Mira wanted physicists from major universities to help them develop aerospace technology. The Justice League asked for six months to review the request. This choice would affect the future of trillions of creatures on Mira.

When it came to major decisions like this, Superman had learned to break the choice down into little choices. It was far easier and simple to make five to seven small choices than one intimidatingly big choice.

First he had to decide whether it was a choice for Superman or for Clark Kent. Superman tended to handle the work that only a superhero could do like fighting wars and investigating psychopathic killers. Clark handled more mundane things like paying taxes and voting in elections. It usually wasn't hard to decide whether things were in Superman's realm or Clark's realm. Still, he had screwed this up in the past. When he first met Lois, he thought he should be Clark with her. It took a long time, embarrassingly so, to figure out he needed to be Superman when he wanted to grab her attention. But the Mira problem was far too much for an American journalist to handle so he knew he had to engage the cavalier Kryptonian.

Next he had to decide how to rank values in the decision. This tended to be a harder call than the first, but still not too vexing. In this case, Superman had to balance the costs and benefits of spaceships. Now the Mirans were barely able to feed their population. They knew about crop rotation and animal husbandry. They were woefully ignorant of chemical fertilizers and gene splicing of plants. It was always tricky to cast alien planets in the mold of Earth but the techies at Star Labs told him Mira had farm science equivalent to medieval England. So resources Mira spent on rockets would take away from resources spent on food, meaning more people could starve if Earth gave them the tech. However, arguably this idea could be turned into a strong claim for the opposite conclusion. By giving blueprints and procedures to the Mirans, the physicists might save scientists on Mira valuable time they would need to figure out spaceships if they had to do it without any help. The evidence shows that Mirans really want to explore space so it's inevitable that they will develop some kind of space program. The question is how fast?

But there was also the question of interplanetary conflict. Though Mira's scientists were modest in their accomplishments, they were not totally naïve. Given schematics of booster rockets and space shuttles, they could engineer pretty powerful weapons. From what we know of Mira's history, all of their wars have been fairly small in scale and short in length. It was nothing like Apokolips, Darkseid's homeworld, which feasted on blood like a vampire. Apokolips had known civil wars that stretched across 8 of its 9 continents. It had waged interplanetary uprisings that yawned across galaxies. Mira's neighbor Frac, provides a cautionary example. Within a century of its first space flight, it had been embroiled in 4 different wars with two different planets. Their population had been nearly cut in half and the planet is still a ruin.

It didn't help that Bruce and Diana were at odds on this choice. Bruce placed his black gloved hand on my shoulder and said, "Ignorance is bliss, Clark. Let them stay in technological childhood a little longer."

But Diana was adamant. She told an ancient parable about her people, the Amazons, and the Babylonians. It was a complex myth with intrigue between deities and political maneuvering on both sides. The gist was that Babylon refused to teach Diana's people how to build chariots. It made the Amazons furious. They had worked out a tribute deal with Egypt's Pharaoh so that the Egyptians would get fine ceramics and the Amazons would get chariots. Egypt and the Amazons became strong allies and invaded Babylon together. Egypt's gift cemented its place in the hearts and minds of Amazonia as a loyal friend, while Babylon's denial made it a despicable enemy.

In the end, Superman decided on the basis of one seemingly small, but actually crucial detail. A delegation from Mira's Alvaran community spoke to the Justice League. They explained why they wanted spaceships. There was an ancient legend that every Miran learned in childhood. It said that the Mirans were not actually native to Mira. At least not the sentient ones. Before there was life on Mira, the story goes, the ancestors of the Mirans lived on Troa. No one knows for sure where Troa is, but there are two or three compelling candidates within a light-year away from Mira. The story goes that Troa had been a mighty planet but its greed and sinfulness led to a series of manmade and natural disasters. Eventually the whole planet's population dwindled to just ten people - five male and five female. One day, they decided that they could not survive on their own and only the Great God could save them. So they prayed. And prayed. And at the end of the third day, a sparkling white oval appeared on the ground before them. They were scared and did not know what it was, but curiosity overcame fear and they all stepped inside. By some means magical and wonderous, they all found themselves on a new planet. Mira. The name Mira actually come from the roots mi and ra meaning "ten souls." The Alvarans simply wanted to find Troa and place a commemorative marker on its surface.

This was the plea Superman could not reject. For his own homeworld was long gone and even with his formidable strength, he could not bear to a deny a nation the chance to go home.


End file.
